Web design for businesses across Cumbria
Cumbria is a big county with a small-county feel — and that shapes how business works here. Your customers might be locals who've known your name for years, visitors passing through the Lakes, or clients on the other side of the country who found you online. Your website has to work for all of them.
We're Core Media Design, a web design studio based in Penrith, right in the middle of the county. We've been building websites for Cumbrian businesses since 2006 — long enough to have worked with most kinds of business this county produces.
One county, many economies
A website that works for a Carlisle professional firm looks nothing like one built for a Keswick guesthouse or a Kendal outdoor brand shipping nationwide. The city trades on trust and enquiries; the Lake District tourism economy lives and dies by bookings; the Eden Valley's farms, trades, and food producers need to be found by people who didn't know they existed yesterday.
We build for all of it, and we build differently for each: enquiry-led websites for service businesses, direct-booking journeys for Windermere and Lakes hospitality, and online systems — booking flows, customer portals, integrations — for businesses whose admin has outgrown email.
A web designer in Cumbria — not an agency at arm's length
If you're specifically looking for a freelance web designer in Cumbria — one senior person who does the thinking and the building, with no account managers in between — that's exactly how we work. Sebastian, our founder, handles every project personally from first conversation to launch, and he's the same person you'll ring a year later.
And if you were searching for a web design agency or company: honestly, what most businesses want from an agency is capacity and reliability, not headcount. You get agency-standard output here — WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility, performance engineering, proper process — without agency overhead built into the price.
Web design for Cumbrian small businesses
Most of our clients are small and medium-sized businesses — the backbone of this county. Trades, tourism, professional services, food and drink, retail. What they have in common is that the website has a job to do: generate enquiries, take bookings, or make the business easier to run. We scope every project around that job — no packages, no template with your logo dropped in.
Getting found across the county
Cumbrian customers search locally — "web design Penrith", "accountant Kendal", "holiday cottage Keswick" — and a website has to be structured for the places it serves, not just the services it sells. That structure is built into everything we ship, and for businesses that want to keep climbing after launch, our search engine optimisation service covers the ongoing work: content, local search, and the technical detail that decides who ranks.
Where we work
Everywhere in the county. We keep dedicated pages for the places we work most — Penrith, Carlisle, Kendal, Keswick, Windermere, and the Lake District — but the county page you're reading exists precisely because Cumbria doesn't stop there. Cockermouth, Whitehaven, Workington, Barrow, Ulverston, Appleby, Kirkby Stephen: if you're in Cumbria, you're local to us, and we'll happily come to you.
Choosing a web designer? Do it with your eyes open
Whoever you end up working with, go in informed. We've written an honest guide on how to choose a web design company in Cumbria — the questions to ask, the red flags to walk away from — and it applies whether you choose us or not. When you're ready to compare, our case studies and client reviews are the evidence we'd want to see in your position.
Let's talk about your project
Tell us what you're trying to achieve — more enquiries, direct bookings, less admin, or a website that finally shows up in search — and we'll come back within one working day with the next sensible step. No jargon, no hard sell.